We were dealt a serious blow in California, make no mistake about it.

Not to mention in the states of Florida and Arizona, which also added same sex marriage bans to their state constitutions, and Arkansas, which illegalized any adoption by gay couples.

But I'm still confident that history is eventually on the side of justice. As is demographics.

In every one of those states' exit polls, surveys consistently found that voters 30 and under - across all income, racial and gender categories - tended to vote no on all of those initiatives: the younger, the more progressive. On average, national trends all seem to indicate that more and more Americans are in favor of some kind of legal recognition for gay couples.

This isn't coincidental at all. Older traditionalists with bigoted views are dying off, younger people with modern views are becoming voters. The only question is how to create an effective infrastructure to codify these changing attitudes into the law, as well as oppose conservative efforts to turn back the clock on personal freedoms.

For better or for worse, Prop 8 was a bucket of ice cold water. We were lazy and complicit while the Church of Mormon tossed millions of dollars and thousands of volunteers into California. As long as there is organized resistance anywhere in the country to equality, we will have a hell of a fight ahead of us - even in liberal California.

After the crushing national mandate of last night's election results, conservatives are left struggling to redefine themselves.

Conservative pundits are openly talking about a crackup of their painfully constructed ruling coalition, where issue-based factions lash out against each other in a circular firing squad (much like the Democratic Party around 2002).

We are also seeing a broader class conflict between the two larger coalitions within the Republican tent, best shown by their Conference's reaction to the bailout: between the Paulson conservatives - the pro-business libertarians who could care less about culture wars - and the Huckabee conservatives - who are slightly more economically populist, and strong social traditionalists.

Like most factional infighting, all sides are missing the bigger picture. Republicans have suffered national repudiation because America is rejecting conservatism.

Some of these causes are unstoppable forces. Much like how globalized capitalism destroyed the New Deal's Keynesian Consensus (through the stagflation of the 1970s), demographic shifts are diversifying an already diverse nation. The Republican Party, premised on Lee Atwater's "Southern Strategy", is horribly obsolete in a nation that is expected to have a majority of non-whites in less than 50 years.

But maybe the biggest component of last night's rejection of conservative rule is America's view of the role of government itself. "Small government" no longer has the emotional appeal it once had - not in a country with crumbling infrastructure and rising economic uncertainty. As noted on Daily Kos:

Post-election exit polls show that 51% of voters want government to "do more."  And while 71% of voters said they expected their taxes to go up under Obama's administration, they still voted for him by huge margins.  Just 44% of voters (right around McCain's popular vote percentage) believe that Obama is "too liberal" while 1 in 2 voters thought his ideology was "just right."

Even neoconservative icon William Kristol admits that people all across the political spectrum want "big" government, and that the prime task for a conservative administration isn't to curb the power of government, but transfer that power to the private sector (while maintaining current levels of spending - hence the massive deficits incurred by both Bush and Reagan administrations).

In short, we aren't witnessing an anti-Republican backlash, so much as the beginning of a long-term shift in political attitudes. Think the New Deal, except online.

If there's one thing that the fringe Right is good at, it's latching itself onto (comparitively) mainstream causes and hijacking those causes' messages.

Much like how the Minutemen became a prime recruiting ground for skinhead groups, so are Sarah Palin's rallies becoming a breeding ground for racial terrorism and white supremacist influence.

The Political Cesspool, a white-supremacist organization influenced by the former Council of Conservative Citizens (affectionately referred to as "the white collar Klan"), has been using Palin rallies as a safe haven for capitalizing on the racial animus of base conservatives. The anti-woman, Dominionist group Operation Rescue has been engaged in the same kind of recruitment efforts at the same events, and for the same reasons.

The McCain/Palin campaign may not openly endorse white supremacists or theocracy. But the plain truth is twofold: conservatism provides a safe haven for the nurturing of violent, extremist views, and conservatives can't win without a platform that appeals to bigots.

One of the biggest, most contentious philosophical battles of our time is an illusory smokescreen.

The battle rages over the (socially acceptable) definition of equality, and how best to achieve it. This is traditionally broken into two camps: "equality of outcome" vs. "equality of opportunity."

I think that this distinction is pure bunk.  

Read more below.

What else can we expect? Really. When you start invoking the spectre of terrorism - or, more specifically, when you infer that your opponent "palls around with terrorists" - it's only a matter of time before your followers take that hatred to its obvious logical conclusion.

The traditional media may be slow to call a spade a spade, by describing such rallies - where people have been heard to shout "kill him", "bomb Obama", and where a black filmer was told, "Sit down, boy" to his face - as full of "energy" and "passion".

But we know better. Our nation's history of assassinations, lynch mobs and racial terrorism were all predicated on the same hate-based populism: the "othering" of a person or group on the basis of who they are or what they believe.

The sobering truth is that even once Obama wins, his administration may be opposed (and perhaps violently targeted) by these domestic terrorists for years to come. I retain my hope that our country can outgrow these destructive tendancies; but the growing pains will undoubtedly be long and brutal. 

Apparently they do in Ecuador.

In a national referendum, the Ecuadoran people approved a new constitution - the first in human history to confer legal rights to natural resources.

This is really not that radical, when you think about it.

In a world where corporations and other inanimate entities (considered "artificial persons") enjoy some form of constitutional protection, conferring the same legal protections to natural habitats or plants or animal species seems to be the next logical step.

This extension of rights makes environmental protection much more streamlined and enforceable. Rather than struggling in vain to prove economic or personal harm to human beings, Ecuadoran naturalists now only need to prove imminent harm to nature itself.

Exporting this fantastic legal development to our own country may prove problematic, however, since the American judiciary is extremely hesitant to acknowledge collective rights, let alone rights attributed to non-humans.

Regardless, this is fantastic news all the same. The "Third World" isn't so helpless if you pay attention to the right things.

In the midst of barbaric war in the Caucus region, a rising China showcasing its power through the magnificence of the Olympics, and the continual election of left-leaning, populistic leaders in Latin America, we are witnessing the development of a uniquely 21st century paradox: the re-emergence of nationalism within an internationalistic framework.

Read more below. 

For those of us who may have even the slightest inclination to give anti-abortion activists the benefit of the doubt, the time may have come to shed our last feeling of sympathy.

The Bush White House, in another spectacular display of ideology over science, is proposing a regulation that would deny federal funding to any medical facility that does not allow pharmacists to refuse to hand out Plan B, IUDs and even Birth Control pills for religious reasons. In classic right-wing strawman semantics, this is framed as a matter of "religious freedom" vs. patients' rights.

This alone, I expect, should not be too surprising. We have always been familiar with the Right's ongoing desire to overturn Roe v. Wade. But a deeper look reveals a new ideological battle front altogether: contraception. The Dominionist Right is now beginning to frame contraception as equivalent to abortion.

We would do well to remember that those who style themselves as "pro-life" are not simply anti-abortion. They are against modern sexuality and female sexual independence in their entirety. That the Dominionists are increasingly unveiling their radical agenda may be both a blessing and a curse. A short-term curse that hurts families with draconian punishments, but perhaps a useful opportunity that can help us begin to reverse the damage caused by this utterly wicked, perverse and backwards movement.

Ahh, Ayn Rand. The truest embodiment of American Conservatism.

Don't simply believe that people are inherently selfish and that the market can be trusted to run anything. Believe that selfishness is inherently good for society, embrace a Social Darwinism that elevates the most shameful, plutocratic elites as titanic heroes of liberty, and condemn the rest of us as parasitic ingrates who simply aren't selfish and brilliant enough.

This is the literary genius that brought you Atlas Shrugged. This is seeping into your school system.

That's right, friends. In exchange for a generous donation from the Ayn Rand Institute, your cash-strapped school district is pushing Ayn Rand fiction novels into high school literature curricula in order to brainwash our next generation with egoist, ultra-capitalistic propaganda. Indeed, the Institute is taking the next step by offering grants to cash-strapped universities in exchange for making Ayn Rand's "Objectivist" trash required reading for college literature and business courses.

Objectivism may very well be dismissed as a cult of personality. But understand that Rand's madness is anything but exceptional. The Rand Institute offers millions of dollars in grants because multinational corporations fund it. Ayn Rand's mythology romanticizes capitalism in a way that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" never could. In a world where mainstream academia and business accepts a selfish conception of human nature and a Guilded Age role for government, is it really that far out to romanticize an elite that we already celebrate and lionize?

Ayn Rand, for all her histrionics, was not an extremist so much as a more honest conservative. In fighting against her propaganda, we fight against more than Objectivism. We oppose a poisonous, anti-social value system that places the gratification of the ego before all else. We oppose Conservatism.

All groups are driven by self-interest. Whether they are social classes, governmental or corporate bureaucracies, or institutions of any kind, the same force is in play: the instinct of self-preservation.

It is this universal force that leads me to believe that the very existence of charity is an impediment to the abolition of injustice.

Read more below.